My best Calendar Management Tip

I support my executive who is the Chief of Staff of our organization, and so you can imagine – he gets a lot of medium requests, and sometimes the requests come from him like he will be in a meeting with someone and he’ll say: “Hey we should set this up and talk about that”, but it is usually related to their specific job or their department so I can’t possibly schedule every single meeting that he is in. So, I have made it a practice of letting people know that I would offer times when he’s available – diplomatically letting them know that they should do that too (at the same time offering the times they are available). When people send me an email or instant message or they call me to set up a meeting, I copy and paste that entire thread into the meeting invitation that I’m holding. That reminds me of who asked about these meetings and what the purpose of this meeting is, but then it also makes it clear who is scheduling what, so that there’s no confusion about or expectation of me to schedule a meeting just because my executive is in it. So that would be my best calendar tip.

How I became an assistant, my story

After college, I had a retail background because I was trying to get into merchandising marketing aspect of retail and I got stuck working in retail management. I didn’t want to work at retail much longer than I had anticipated. My uncle has an accounting firm in Chicago and one of the staff members was having a baby. She went on maternity leave and my uncle reached out to me and asked if I could work part-time. It was a very flexible schedule so I was able to work my full-time job and also come in and work with him. And to our surprise, she didn’t come back. She was the receptionist and she did some light accounting work but she was primarily the receptionist. I started doing more than just being the receptionist, working more in the capacity of an office manager/benefits administrator on a very small scale because it was a very small company. But, I ended up working for him full time. I did some light accounting work, I didn’t have an accounting background. My background was in marketing but it gave me the opportunity to get a little bit of some accounting work under my belt. I worked for him for two years and during the time I received a call from a person who was recruiting, asking us if we had some open positions. We were a very small company and we didn’t have any openings at that time. We weren’t interested in hiring and I was about to end the call and she said: “What about you? Are you looking?”. I knew because the company was so small that unless I had an interest in becoming an accountant, which I did not, there really wasn’t much more room for me to grow. I said: “Well I’m not looking but I would be open to hearing what you have”. We set up an appointment, I did those skills assessments exams, and got an offer from a real estate company in Chicago- they were looking for an Administrative Assistant to support three of their executives. So, I gave my 2 weeks notice to my uncle, who was also my boss, which was a little difficult. I have been working as an Executive Assistant since then. That gave me the opportunity to work as an Executive Assistant in multiple industries. I have worked for a real estate developer, mutual funds company, the civil engineering firm for a private consulting firm and now I work for an organization that accredits medical residency programs in the United States and some of the parts of the world. It’s been an opportunity to really grow into this field and respect the role that I have. I used to be kind of ashamed to say that I was an Executive Assistant but now I am really proud to say that I am an Executive Assistant and have had the opportunity to develop the role at my company as well as the profession at large. That’s why I become a part of Smart Events and joined in on some of the courses that they are offering, as well the SmartEvents Admins Chats with Laura Belgrado. It’s been great to be a part of it.

One great thing about your executive/your company and how they support your professional development

I have the blessing of working for an executive who offers autonomy. He is not a micromanager, he knows that whatever task he gives me I’m going to do it professionally. I have been with this organization for 13 years, and maybe 2 or 3 years ago he said to me: “ I don’t even know what you do from day to day”. At first, I thought that was an insult and I was talking to another executive and he said: “No that’s a compliment because if your executive doesn’t know what you are doing from day to day that means that there are no gaps and everything is going well enough that he doesn’t have to worry about what are you doing.” My title doesn’t change much – I do have two roles that are part of my title, but the “bigger thing” for me – more responsibilities. My responsibilities have grown at the time that I have been with this organization. I do have some tasks that are standard Executive Assistant tasks like scheduling and traveling and those kinds of things, but I also have the autonomy and the trust to be able to kind of be not just the delegate but also a representative. The organization supports professional development. We have courses from LinkedIn as well as internally given us the opportunity to grow. We have an Employee Forum. The forum consists of multiple workgroups, they each have a different focus and we do actually have professional development and career advancement workgroup that Is only dedicated to the advancement of all employees. They give us the opportunity to find ways to develop in our particular roles or departments. When we went into shut down in March 2020 all organizations had to find ways to operate and at the same time keep employees engaged. The Employee Forum itself was pretty new. We have just started it right before they shut down, so it gave us the opportunity to have employees who were kind of somewhere in the background, to be able to emerge and be more vocal about things that we would like from the company and things that we need it. Lots of wonderful things have developed from that Employee Forum. It’s been a great organization to work for. I count my blessings every day to be able to work in a place where not only have we been able to maintain employment but also to be able to shift the way we needed to do things and do them efficiently in a virtual environment.